David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest has been hailed as one the great modern American novels and its author, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, as one of the most influential and innovative authors of the past 20 years. Don DeLillo called Infinite Jest a "three-stage rocket to the future," a work "equal to the huge, babbling spin-out sweep of contemporary life," while Time Magazine included Infinite Jest on its list of 100 Greatest Novels published between 1923-2006. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide was the first book to be published on the novel and is a key reference for those who wish to explore further. Infinite Jest has become an exemplar for difficulty in contemporary Fiction--its 1,079 pages full of verbal invention, oblique narration, and a scattered, nonlinear, chronology. In this comprehensively revised second edition, Burn maps Wallace's influence on contemporary American fiction, outlines Wallace's poetics, and provides a full-length study of the novel, drawing out the most important themes and ideas, before surveying Wallace's post-Infinite Jest output, including The Pale King.

"Burn does a fantastic job of showing how the novel is put together without succumbing to the temptation of overexplaining things." Matt Kavanagh, The Globe and Mail

Stephen J. Burn is Associate Professor of English at Northern Michigan University, USA. He is author of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (Continuum 2003) and co-editor of Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008).